Has John Boehner lost control?

First, John Boehner wanted the Senate to pass a payroll tax cut bill. Then, he wanted to make a show of killing it. Now, he won’t hold a House vote on it at all.

In the last and biggest political test of a wild year — Boehner’s final exam for 2012 — the House speaker has shown yet again that he doesn’t have the juice to whip his troops into line. If anything, it is rank-and-file House Republicans who are continually snapping their leader back to the pack when he gets too far out in front of them.

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His plans change with their whims, the latest of which is to escalate a battle with a nearly unified Senate and President Barack Obama over a two-month extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut, welfare and unemployment programs, and current Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors.

GOP leaders on Monday abandoned a day-old proposal to vote down the Senate bill, which would have required Republicans to to defy their brand by going on record against a tax cut. Now, they’re portraying a procedural vote to create a House-Senate conference as an implicit rejection of the Senate’s bill. Republicans believe they can win a showdown with the Senate and either get the full-year extension of the payroll tax cut they seek or win the public relations war if 160 million working Americans see their taxes rise in January.

It’s a high-risk strategy with little reward available: In the worst-case scenario, House Republicans would take sole blame for raising taxes, cutting welfare and unemployment benefits just after Christmas and slashing reimbursement rates for doctors who treat Medicare patients. House Democrats now sense a potential game-changer for their prospects of winning control of the chamber in 2012, which have been dim.

Some Republicans said privately that they weren’t certain that the strategy would work.

“We’ll find out,” said one.

But the best outcome for House Republicans is that they extract a measure of pain from the Senate, forcing minor concessions in a negotiation where the major sticking point between the two sides is whether the extension of expiring laws lasts for two months or 11 months. Facing vocal opposition from the president, Democrats and even some of their fellow Republicans in the Senate, Republicans could take a shellacking in the court of public opinion even if they manage to rewrite the bill.

Either way, they’re playing into Obama’s plans to run against the widely and deeply unpopular Congress.

Boehner’s camp insists everything is going according to script.

“Our goal, from start to finish, has been to avoid a tax hike, extend and reform unemployment insurance, protect Social Security, and help create jobs. The best way to accomplish that goal right now is for a conference committee to resolve the differences between the House- and Senate-passed bills,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said. “This is regular order — the system that our founders created to craft legislation, and House Republicans promised to restore.”

But the endgame reads more like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book than a carefully scripted drama.